Louisville brings in public to brainstorm on downtown parking problem

Lisa Long backs her car into a parking spot on Main Street in Louisville on Wednesday. (Mark Leffingwell / Daily Camera)

LOUISVILLE — Getting to downtown Louisville has never been a problem. But staying there for any length of time can be.

On Wednesday night, the city held a public meeting to begin a communitywide effort to address the nettlesome problem of parking in the city's downtown core — finding a space, managing the spaces, and making sure those locking up their cars to enjoy Louisville's vibrant downtown shopping and restaurant scene aren't making life a mess for the people who live here.

"We have a parking management problem in Old Town," said Planning Director Troy Russ, referring to the neighborhoods in and around the Main Street corridor. "If we don't manage it, we could have fewer people giving their support to downtown."

Wednesday's meeting at City Hall, which was attended by about 60 people, saw residents break into five groups to pore over giant maps of the downtown street grid and identify possible solutions to the problem.

Ideas as varied as parking meters, resident permit parking, pairing with private lot owners to get additional spaces or providing feeder shuttles from parking areas outside the immediate downtown district all came up as possibilities.

Laura Page, who lives near Community Park, spoke for a group of about 12 residents. They said the idea of enforcing permit parking on surrounding streets, whether it's just for peak periods or all the time, took a prominent place in their discussion.

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"There are people in and out of their homes all day long, and they'd like it to be designated parking," Page said.

Russ said the problem isn't necessarily too few spaces in the heart of the city, but the way people use them. There is a disproportionate reliance on on-street parking, which often has the greatest impacts on residents living a few blocks off of Main Street.

And the problem has only gotten more acute in the last few years, as the restaurant scene has boomed, with patios in the summer only adding to downtown's allure. The Louisville Downtown Street Faire, on nine Friday nights in the summer, now regularly draws several thousand people to the city looking for room to park.

Susan Honstein, who lives on Pine Street, said revelers — and their trash — often find themselves sprawled on her front lawn as they make their way back to their vehicles after a night of downing shots and chugging beers.

"It's the disrespect from visitors from out of town," she said. "It's beginning to feel as though my private space is becoming public space."

She led a group Wednesday that identified lots around the edges of downtown that could provide additional parking capacity.

Russ said it is simply too expensive for the city to buy its way out of the problem. He said buying land for parking works out to about $10,000 a space. Add another $22,500 a space if that capacity comes in the form of a parking structure.

"There isn't a silver bullet to parking," he said.

But because 60 percent of parking capacity downtown is held in private hands, Russ said a good course of action for the city to follow would be leasing spaces from businesses, like churches or banks, that aren't typically using them at night.

"We do have a parking challenge at night that we don't have at lunch or in the afternoon," he said.

Barbara Butterworth, who owns the Book Cellar used book store on Main Street, agreed that the city is not at the point where it needs to start buying land for parking.

"There are still a lot of spaces out there that people are not using," she said. "There's enough that they don't have to buy."

The city has conducted a couple of parking action plan studies in the last few years. It updated its 2009 study with one last year to account for downtown Louisville's rapidly changing activity level.

Russ said the city's parking advisory committee would come up with a list of alternatives for the planning commission to consider by the end of next month. The issue could come before the City Council in June.

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